Origin
The ballet, based on an earlier ballet composed in 1939 by Khachaturian called Happiness, was created when the Kirov ballet was in Perm (during the World War II evacuation). Khachaturian started composing the score in autumn 1941, and the ballet was first mounted on 3 December 1942 on the small stage of the Perm state theatre. But despite these limitations, the effect was profound; in effect, the message was that the company was continuing to exist and to produce new ballets, despite the very hard times. Anisimova invited different dancers to participate in her ballet, dancers who happened to be in the city at that time: there was a sense of camaraderie and combined effort which suited the positive feeling of the ballet itself.
The principal dancers were: Natalia Dudinskaya (Gayane), Nikolai Zubkovsky (Karen), Konstantin Sergeyev (Armen), Tatanya Vecheslova (Nune), and Boris Shavrov (Giko). The conductor was Pavel Feldt.
The composition, the music, the dancing — all together created something which, regardless of the weaknesses in the libretto, expressed the triumph of dancing and its many different possibilities.
Read more about this topic: Gayane (ballet)
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a byroad
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Each structure and institution here was so primitive that you could at once refer it to its source; but our buildings commonly suggest neither their origin nor their purpose.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ... “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.””
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)